Fractal
by Stunt Muppet
Summary: Infinity unfolds from even a line. The Doctor's sleeping mind has much to sort through.


In every point in time there are an infinite number and variety of actions, and within those actions there are the components of actions – muscle motion, inertia, momentum – and the cellular processes that enable those actions, and the interlocking mechanisms of atoms and molecules that enable those cellular processes, and then beyond those lie the possibilities, the actions that are not taking place and will have been taking place if something in the future changes, and the trillions upon trillions of parts of every potentiality, and the past and future that echo in each moment and the trillions of parts that make them up and the changes, the details that reappear and disappear between past and future and potential present, and so every point in time spirals out into infinity, a fractal unfolding from a line.

* * *

><p>It is not the first time the Doctor has dreamed of Jo, after she left; she peeks into his sleeping mind every so often. All his friends do, as do all their possibilities once they've settled back into their own linear time.<p>

It isn't even the first time that he's taken her out into the Vortex beyond time and space, nor the first time her dream image has requested it – her one last trip, her last chance to see everything.

It is the first time she's looked only at him.

"You haven't gone back," she says, leaning in close to him. "I thought you would, when I left."

"Back where?"

"Out here. Out into space." She takes a brief look around, as if the parabolic arcs of time were a pretty hillside on Earth. "I mean, I know you said you wouldn't leave me behind, but…" She leans against him, her hand on his cheek. "But it's all so beautiful, Doctor."

He closes his hand around hers, feeling the tremors of her fast, descending movement through time. "It is, isn't it," he replies, but the colors and dimensions of the Vortex have begun to trail to black.

And then her tiny, fragile hand falls apart in his, dissolving into lines, like a thread wrapped around a model of a human hand – and then it dissolves into a fistful of string, tangling in his fist.

He pulls away, frightened, and she looks at him curiously and asks "What's wrong?"

* * *

><p>The threads look like ribbon but feel like wire, not quite thin enough to break his skin but enough to mark, red and raw. And they loop and tighten across every surface like spider's silk - around his fingers and wrists and ankles and arms and back and throat and the most delicate flesh on his body...<p>

By now there's nothing left of her below the hips, and even that has begun to slacken up to her navel, thin dark gaps showing between the threads. One arm has dissolved into thread up to the shoulder, and with the hand that remains she - touches.

Nothing more. Just strokes the threads connecting them like the strings of a harp. The pressure she exerts is slight but it's enough to tighten every coil, digging the wire deeper into his skin - just slightly, like a ring of pinpricks. He squirms involuntarily but he welcomes the stimulation, the unambiguous shock a relief against the swells of superposition.

The sublimity of space of time feels meaningless in its sheer scale now, and the hard, hot spark of sensation is small, momentary. A point.

She tugs at the strings again and this time it's enough to draw a cry from his throat - of fear, of craving. He shouldn't want this. He can't want it. The beauty - the majesty he's abandoning for nothing more than a spark, for the basest form of pleasure. Because once she pulls too tightly, once the threads of her body cut into his skin and mark him as their own -

Would it disappear, the vortex around him? Would he cease to see it? Would he cease to want it, to notice what he'd lost and how clumsily he'd begun to reclaim it?

What if they didn't give it all back? He might not have noticed if they hadn't, so eager had he been to return to flight. There might still be memories, facts, ideas missing, and maybe they were so skillfully stolen from his brain he wouldn't remember he'd ever had them.

He envisions her complete dissolution, her body cocooning his until he is motionless and blind and silent (he opens his mouth to speak but her threads press in tighter, locking his lips shut). Beneath her bindings he is numb with the pressure and, around his fingers where she's pierced him at last, slick with blood. Nothing to feel but the closeness of this embrace, sinking slowly deeper inside him.

"You finally have your freedom and still you cling to this dull planet and its dull people."

The Doctor looks up, and between him and what remains of Jo the Master is looking down at him, arms crossed. The Doctor wants to explain himself, make the Master understand why he's there, even if he doesn't know himself, even if he owes the Master nothing.

"I'm disappointed in you, Doctor," he says, shaking his head. "You prostrate yourself before the Time Lords, take care of all the problems they can't be bothered with, get back everything you wanted – and even your dreams are simple. Linear."

The Master keeps walking, eventually kneeling down beside the Doctor, close enough to look him in the eye.

"There was a time, Doctor, when you dreamed in fractals."

And he takes the threads between his fingers and snaps them, one by one, at the spot just before they meet the Doctor's skin, freeing him, leaving only the red ligature lines where they looped around him.

Somewhere far away he hears Jo choke, stifling a cry, as every thread breaks.

* * *

><p>The sting has faded and the strings that make her up have spilled in endless tangles around him.<p>

"You can learn it again, Doctor," the Master murmurs, leaning over his prone and aching body, an anchor against the abstract. "No matter how long you've spent on this blighted planet you're a Time Lord still. Pasts, futures, possibilities, they are all yours." His hand glides down the Doctor's arm, passing delicate over the red lines that remain. "My gift to you."

Grasping the Doctor's hand in his own he tangles the closest thread in his fingers and guides the Doctor as it spirals in on itself, the nautiloid curl dragging more and more threads in with it, until they all draw inward, stirring like the sea.

"Remember how it looked when you saw it for the first time," comes another whisper, as spirals beget spirals. "You told me you would immerse yourself in it, know every second of its beauty. And now you're here. You had to interfere, didn't you, Doctor? If you'd left well enough alone you might still be out there."

He lets his eyes unfocus, watching the threads before him until their movements become indistinct and they press at his mind in swells - and they seem now to envelope him instead of entangling, their vastness tethering him to the vortex as they disappear beyond his field of vision.

The Master lays a quit kiss on the back of his neck, and - the Doctor had buried, for such a long time, the feeling that came from threading himself into the Master's mind and loosening the warp and weft of his own, but now that he feels the Master's clear, dark intelligence again the memories become sharp and demanding. He arches up against him, inviting his touch, and the Master responds in kind, trailing the kiss along his jaw and settling close against him, reaching almost gently into his consciousness - and oh, it has been so _long_ since anyone had given him that, laced themselves into him down to the nerves.

And even as the Doctor gives in the Master still guides his hand, twisting the threads into spirals on spirals on spirals, growing out into the infinite. And at the center of it all she sighs, and watches, and waits.

* * *

><p>Among the many ideas that humans have cast out like rope ladders in an attempt to understand their larger universe is that of <em>kama<em>, physical desire as a presence inherent to the physical instead of the spiritual person. Desire binds us to the flesh, perhaps even forces us to inhabit a body we did not make for ourselves.

Even after the Time Lords restored his memory there were seams, sutures. There were pieces missing.

(He had tried to go back for Jamie and Zoe, once, but every time he tried to set the coordinates the precise date and time had slipped from his mind as he typed them - knowing when and where the battle of Culloden happened was one thing, but the numbers, the setting required, was another. And it was still gone.)

The Master remembers him whole.

And as their minds dance along the chaotic fractal unfolding beneath them the Doctor thanks him – for reminding him, letting him taste the whole of time again and remember how much more beautiful it was. For making him himself again. Had he really wished for surrender to the binding of her body, her body that now spread and filled the empty surface in which they lay?

Beside him one Julia curl tightens out of abstraction, re-forming into lunular curves – fingertips, a hand, _her_ hand. Her fingers touch his wrist, too unformed to reach for him.

But _had _he wished it, really? Or was even the flicker of want only a shadow of a fear? She wouldn't – Jo wouldn't - she had left on her own, she hadn't tried to persuade him to stay anywhere. She had even tired of their travels, eventually. So why in his dreams did she bind him?

"I'm so sorry, Jo," he whispers, and kisses at the center of the mathematical mandala her body has formed. He tastes abstraction in her.

Her disconnected hand strokes his cheek, pulling its threads along with it, and he hears her far and quiet: "What's there to be sorry for?"

* * *

><p>Just before he wakes the Master speaks a name he has not heard in centuries, a name he has almost forgotten was once his own.<p>

He knows it isn't his own, not anymore – 'Doctor' was the name he chose, the name he /_is/_ – but that name encompassed him once, before there were so many fragments of him left to piece together.

And he wakes with another name on his lips, one he struggles to remember, that describes the companion the lover the friend that he knew once and can never reclaim.


End file.
